Path of Exile 2's next League will make it a "major objective" to make all Skills Endgame-viable

Path of Exile 2's next big League won't be making the same mistake as Dawn of The Hunt. Otherwise known as patch 0.2.0, this current and ongoing League has been the most negative reception of any league between PoE2 and the first game, since the (in)famous Lake of Kalandra. The bad press can be attributed to many things, but one of the main criticisms was how it curbed the numbers on many Skills, making them worse for wear in the campaign, let alone endgame viability.

In an interview with Talkative Tri today, GGG Game Director Jonathan Rogers admitted that this was owing to an oversight. Going forwards, it will be a "major objective" to give us a fuller toolbox of individual Skills that can scale well into Endgame.

Path of Exile 2's current League has reinvented the problem it was trying to solve

These are not the most well-distributed numbers (Image via GGG)

Build variety tends to be the most obvious gauge of an ARPG's overall design success, so it's not a good look if the entire meta stagnates into trying just a few builds.

In its first Early-Access start, patch 0.1.0, this was mostly a lot of Infernalists letting flaming skulls do the dirty work for them, Invokers Ice-Striking their way to success, or (for a very brief time), Cast-on-Freeze autopiloting the game for you.

GGG actually nerfed triggered Metagems for that very reason a week into the fresh League, but elected to not do a full-fledged mid-season balance patch. With 0.2.0, they reset the board to make combat deadlier, like how they envisioned Path of Exile 2 to begin with.

However, the nerfhammer hit so hard that it essentially recreated the same problem. Within the first two weeks, it was obvious that Dawn of The Hunt would only be less miserable with the few good builds like Essence Drain - Contagion.

To this day, it's quite easy to see where that's led to, with just how heavily Lightning Spear overwhelms other Spear Skills, all introduced in the same patch. Admitting this, Jonathan Rogers elaborated that they went overboard with their emphasis on Skill comboing:

"Because in PoE1 the expectation was [that] every skill can be your primary skill... and even though we paid more attention when thinking about each skill like - okay, how is this exactly going to become the only skill you're using at Endgame? With the comboing stuff, I feel like we lost the sight of that a bit too much, because the assumption was (kind of) that: Well, you're using all sorts of different skills. So you don't have to worry too much about whether this skill scales, or that skill scales."

The assumption that multi-Skill gameplay complexity would make it engaging backfired in a sense; the Director himself admits that it was a "mistake":

"I feel like that was actually a mistake. Because what it meant was, we had our eyes off the ball a little bit from: Okay, how can this skill actually become good enough to be used at Endgame? The reason why you're seeing all these variety concerns is because of the fact that [...] we didn't put enough thought into that on an individual skill basis."

In the same interview, it was confirmed that GGG is taking a different approach with their League-reset windows now. Instead of waiting for all the expected content to be at the perfect state of polish, the emphasis will go to doing a new League every four months, both for Path of Exile 1 and 2.

By this new model, we should see Path of Exile 2 patch 0.3.0 sometime in July, which is when GGG's success at achieving this "major objective" will be apparent.

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About the author

Sambit Pal is an esports Journalist on Gaming and MMO at Sportskeeda. He has Master's degree in English Literature. In his spare time, he is an amateur sleuth trying to trace the Riven Mafia in Warframe, and a recovering Bethesda modding addict. He also secretly enjoys action Roguelites, a severe lack of gitting gud notwithstanding.

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Edited by Sambit Pal